Philosophy | youaskedwhat?

15 questions

Philosophy5 May 2026

If you replaced every part of a ship one by one, is it still the same ship — and does that apply to you?

The Ship of Theseus is a 2,000-year-old thought experiment that becomes significantly more unsettling when you apply it to the person reading it.

Philosophy5 May 2026

If a ship has every plank replaced, is it still the same ship — and does the answer matter?

Philosophy5 May 2026

Does the universe owe us anything?

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is boredom underrated?

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is there a version of you that only exists when no one is watching?

Identity is partly performance. We know this. The question is what remains when the performance stops — and whether that residue is more or less real than the version everyone else sees.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is meritocracy a myth, a goal, or a justification for inequality?

Meritocracy is one of those ideas that almost everyone claims to believe in and almost no one agrees on. That is not a coincidence.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Does the concept of free will survive serious contact with neuroscience?

Neuroscience has not killed free will. But it has changed what we should mean by it — and that matters more than people admit.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Does it matter whether your life has meaning if you feel like it does?

Meaning might be the one thing that works by being believed in, regardless of whether it's there.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is there a version of objective morality that does not ultimately rest on an assumption?

Every moral system bottoms out somewhere. The question is whether that matters — and whether some foundations are more defensible than others.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is there any meaningful difference between a memory and a lie you've told yourself often enough?

Neuroscience has a fairly uncomfortable answer to this.

Philosophy5 May 2026

What would you actually lose if you lost your sense of self?

The self is not a thing in the brain. It is a process — a story the brain tells about its own activity. Lose it and you don't lose a possession. You lose the narrator. But the story might continue anyway.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Are we living in a simulation?

The simulation argument is more rigorous than it sounds — and harder to dismiss than most people think. The problem is that being right about it changes almost nothing.

Philosophy5 May 2026

Is consciousness a thing, or just what it feels like to be a very busy brain?

The hard problem of consciousness is hard for a specific reason: it might not be solvable in the way we're used to solving things.

Philosophy23 Apr 2026

Is there a meaningful difference between being happy and feeling happy?

If you feel happy but have reasons not to be, does that count? Philosophy and neuroscience have different answers.

Philosophy23 Apr 2026

Do you actually have free will, or are you just a very complicated domino?

Probably not in the way you think. But the conclusion is less depressing than philosophers make it sound.